


Plight of the Living Dead

by Omnicat



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Aftermath of Temporary Character Death, Christmas Isn't Canon, Domestic Bliss, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Halloween Costumes, Holiday Spirit XXL, Holidays, Humor, Mismatched Memories Due To Time Travel, Parenthood, Post-Canon, arts and crafts, halloween decorations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:13:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28362213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/pseuds/Omnicat
Summary: Garcia and Lorena decide the first Flynn family Halloween in their new timeline is going to be the best ever. Rittenhouse sucked all the joy from their lives for far too long. Now that they’ve been defeated, nothing else is going to ruin their good time.There’s just one tiny complication: Iris’s idea of a good time.
Relationships: Flynn & Lorena & Iris, Lorena/Flynn
Comments: 13
Kudos: 14
Collections: Timeless Secret Santa Fic Exchange 2020





	1. The Plan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UnUnpredictableMe (DraejonSoul)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DraejonSoul/gifts).



> This gift got away from me a little, both in terms of how long it’s turning out to be and how much time it’s taking me to finish, and because... a Halloween-themed fic as a Christmas gift?! I knooow, this is as *shows up fifteen minutes late with Starbucks* as the *shows up fifteen minutes late with Starbucks* meme itself must be by now. But I found myself with so many possible ways to go and so many ideas to choose from, I wound up quite literally picking one from a hat, and then there was no stopping the plot bunnies anymore. If I ever get dive-bombed with more fluffy ideas to torment the Flynns and end up posting a Christmas-themed sequel for Valentine’s Day, try to act surprised. :P
> 
> But anyway, a belated Happy Holidays from your Secret Santa, UnUnpredictableMe, and I hope you enjoy this offering of domestic misadventures with the Flynn family! :D

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains spoilers for _Practical Magic_.

They went to bed early on Monday, September 30, 2019.

Garcia went to bed early a lot these days; he still didn’t sleep very well, so he made up for the two or three hours he typically spent lying awake or pacing the house (fine, patrolling the perimeter) by blocking out eleven hours for sleep instead of eight. And much as he hated to admit it, there was something comforting about falling asleep to the familiar sounds of Lorena puttering around downstairs as they mutually pretended not to know that she’d become extra careful not to cause any sudden loud noises while he was in another room, and waking up to the eternal surprise of her beside him, breathing softly and evenly, instead of... well. Over nine months after the end of Rittenhouse, he didn’t _startle_ awake anymore. He just drifted into the chagrined realization that he was once again no longer asleep and unlikely to doze off again for ages, like a normal insomniac. That was progress.

September 30, though, Lorena came upstairs with him, and they made love like nothing had happened and no time had passed for him that hadn’t been exactly the same for her. More progress. But a lot of time _had_ passed differently between the two of them, so Garcia felt he could be excused for not realizing the significance of the date. At least a little.

They made love, they washed up and changed for bed, they got comfortable, and Garcia fell asleep with blessed ease. And then, when the clock struck twelve, Lorena shook him awake again.

"Why," he lamented in a croaky voice as she turned on her bedside lamp. He caught an overexposed glimpse of her huge grin and quickly squeezed his eyes shut. "Don’t I suffer enough."

"Do you know what day it is?"

Eyelids were useless, so he pulled his pillow over his face. "No."

"First day of Halloween Month!"

"...oh, _that_."

His memory had completely overlooked this particular way Lorena’s love of Halloween manifested himself. Normally that would elicit some kind of emotion, but she’d dragged him from so deep inside his REM cycle that that part of his brain refused to come back online until it was 100% sure he was staying awake long enough for it to matter.

"You don’t have to get excited right this second, I understand. But the fun season from Halloween to New Year’s has officially started, and –" Lowering her voice from its high-pitched, singsong-y ‘excitement!!’ lilt, she lifted his pillow and stuck her own head underneath with him. "– I want the holidays to be good this year, Garcia. Not ‘grin and bear half of it to get to the fun other half’, fun all the way through. For all three of us. And I mean _all_ the way through. No exceptions or compromises. We’re not adding a single external cause of stress or anxiety this year. We have enough rattling around in our heads to make us miserable."

 _I know_ I _do –_ Garcia found himself thinking before he could help himself. _– but you’re handling the bad memories I saddled you with and the good memories I deprived you of with that first, sorry excuse for a ‘rescue’ better than I ever could._

But he shouldn’t think like that, he reminded himself. Her pain was no less than his just because she was more functional under it and didn’t express it in all the same ways he was used to seeing in guys with combat PTSD. But at the same time, he wasn’t weaker or less worthy than she was for struggling the way he did. For one thing, to him the fight against Rittenhouse had been only the last in a long line of war zones, and just like you couldn’t get shot in the same place five times and expect the fifth time to heal just as quickly and cleanly as the first time (if you were so lucky at all), he shouldn’t fault his mind for not immediately bouncing back from this. Doctor’s orders.

"As in, if you don’t want to have to figure out what to write in your brother’s Christmas card, I’ll write it for you, since I at least remember talking to him as an adult," Lorena said. Shaking off his distraction, Garcia turned his head toward her, and their noses brushed. "Or if you wake up one December morning with an overwhelming urge to finally see your family again and meet him in person, we’ll gather up all the presents in a sack and catch the first flight across the Atlantic. I’m calling my parents the day before Thanksgiving and telling them we can’t come because we all caught a horrible case of the flu. This year I swear I’ll go through with it. With Christmas too, probably. Iris can have nothing but chili fries and fish sticks for every big meal, and you won’t even have to lay eyes on any cranberry sauce. You can spoil her with five years worth of presents if you still feel the urge, I won’t stop you like I did for her birthday, I won’t even look at you funny. We’ll just explain to her that Santa Claus only buys part of the presents each year. And if you don’t want to come to Mass with me this time, you have my sincerest blessing to sleep in and take Iris ice skating instead."

Frowning, he squinted at her, and lifted the pillow to let in just slightly more light. "What?"

Lorena smirked. "Oh, _now_ I’ve got your attention?"

"How is that ‘no compromises’? It’s always been important to you that we come along."

He felt her shrug.

"Priorities. Not all the things we want can be compatible, I know that. I value your happiness more than I value you going through the motions with me."

"Lorena, this isn’t necessary."

"It’s what I want." She lifted the pillow up a little higher still. "This holiday season is going to be about what _we_ want and nothing else. It’s going to be a relaxed, obligation-free winter and autumn. I’ll put up my decorations as early as I feel like, leave them out for as long as I feel like, and have my way with you in the light of pumpkin lanterns and Christmas tree lights for three months straight."

"Ah, now _that’s_ a tradition I remember," he murmured with a crooked grin.

Her whole face scrunched up with the effort it took her not to beam back. "Figures."

She plucked the pillow from his hands while he was distracted by her beauty, and tossed it to the foot end of the bed. Then she took a familiar pen and notebook from her night stand. Both black; the pen bearing a fuzzy, googly-eyed spider on a spring on the end. It was still wearing the tiny orange witch hat he’d glued on last – well, years ago, now. The notebook was crisscrossed with glow-in-the-dark spider web patterns and dotted with pumpkin stickers. Sitting up straight, legs folded in lotus position, Lorena uncapped the pen and put nib to paper with an air of great import.

"The first holiday on the schedule is, of course, Halloween, and I feel it probably also poses the greatest challenge to our plan."

"I’ve already agreed to it being _our_ plan?" he asked in amusement. He rolled onto his side and propped his head up on his hand.

"There is no possible reason why you’d object to a plan to make the holidays as nice as they can be, so yes, let’s assume you have and proceed accordingly. Now, spank me if I’m being patronizing and overprotective, but the last time we celebrated Halloween after you came back from a war, you kiiiind of broke the nose of that guy dressed like a suicide bomber."

"It was an offensively tasteless costume," he muttered, still mutinous after all this time.

"Agreed, but that wasn’t the reason you punched him, and it’s not my point now. Back then, you were pretty sensitive to random gore and things like that. Have you... noticed anything like that again this year? That you haven’t already told me about?"

He opened his mouth and then closed it again, hesitating. No. Yes? That didn’t count, though. He’d been seriously messed up after Somalia. (In hindsight, he’d already been messed up after Darfur. And Afghanistan. And Chechnya. And Kosovo. But he really went downhill after Somalia. Abandoning open warfare as a career path was one of his better decisions.) But he’d worked through the issues going to war so many times had left him with as much as anyone could, he thought, and he remembered the lessons he’d learned the last time. This time around it was mostly the newfound paranoia and guilty existential chaos that tripped him up. Plus, he’d come home in the summer, that time, not a week before last Christmas; he’d had a lot more time to adjust back to peacetime and civilian life since Rittenhouse. Sure, violent and gory imagery would never be his idea of _fun_ , but his pride didn’t allow him to say ‘yeah, let’s scratch all of that’ about something so... so...

Lorena looked away, the curls of her hair obscuring her face. "Personally, I’d rather avoid it. Especially on Iris. I don’t even want to see her as a vampire with blood around her mouth. I know I just said ‘no compromises’, but if she wants to dress up as something dead or bloodied this year, we’re talking her out of it. I can’t look at the pictures of the year we turned her stroller into a coffin or that time we stuck her full of those half-embedded rubber knives and arrows and stuff without wanting to cry."

Okay, never mind.

"No random gore, no Dead or Dying Iris costume," he agreed. "No Dead or Dying Lorena either, for that matter. Not this year." He reached out and curled his fingers around her wrist. "I’m not going to punch anyone this time, but I don’t need those reminders either. And if I run into anything else I want to veto, I promise I’ll tell you."

"Right, good, that’s settled then."

Without looking up at him, she made a note in her Halloween Log. He squeezed her wrist.

"If there’s something like this you want or need, you don’t have to pretend it’s for my sake. You know that, right?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"No, not ‘yeah, yeah’ – _‘yes’_ , full stop," he insisted. "We are not going to fall back into habits that weren’t helpful even back when I was the only one who heard the bombs drop. If you get to nag me about taking my Stuff seriously, I get to nag you right back about yours."

She looked up, and her hesitation turned into a tender smile. "Okay. _Yes,_ dear."

He grinned. "Now I know why you like nagging me so much. This ‘helping you feel better marinaded in validation’ thing feels great."

Rolling her eyes fondly, she made another note in her book. "Okay, next item on the list. Jump scares. Yay or nay?"

"Nay," Garcia said without hesitation.

An ‘X’ in the book. "How do you _really_ feel about my pumpkin cooking? I want a completely honest answer this time."

Uh-oh. Busted.

"...do I have to?"

"Yes."

"But I don’t wanna."

She made a sympathetic face. "You gotta."

"That –" he said, pointing. "– feels like it goes against the new rules of the season."

"The rules don’t go into effect until we’ve clearly established what they are," she declared. "Come on, I’m not going to be upset. If anything, the opposite. Seize this moment, Garcia. Redeem yourself. Be a _useful_ test subject for my seasonal culinary experiments for once in your life," she needled with twinkling eyes.

So busted. He wondered if in this timeline, they’d continued their song and dance of Lorena having the time of her life and him stubbornly pretending he liked pumpkin for dinner just as much as he liked everything else she made, or if they’d resolved this ridiculousness years ago.

"I..."

Lorena nodded encouragingly.

"The rules say we won’t pressure each other to eat anything holiday-y we don’t want, yes? Do I have your word that if I say no to something, you won’t try to modify the recipe until I like it either?"

"Sure."

"Because I know how much you love the challenge. I hate seeing you put in so much effort and passion only to give up in the end because I just don’t like something and never will. Do you _promise_ you’ll leave it be?"

She looked almost touched, under all the amusement. "I do solemnly swear."

"I like it in your baked goods," he finally said. "Salad is fine. But I can’t stand it hot."

"No pumpkin soup or stew for you this year, got it," Lorena said, scribbling calmly. Then she half-turned away from him, pumped her fists into the air in celebration ‘where he couldn’t see it’, and whisper-cheered, _"Truuuth! Finallyyyyy!"_

Garcia covered his face with his hand and, smiling behind his fingers, begged: "And for pity’s sake, let me eat my pie cold."

 _"Sacrilege,"_ she said. Shaking her head, she turned back to her writing. "But fine."

"Aaaaaaand I like pumpkin spice too," he added with a grimace that was at least half grin. "If only for variety. And always in drinks. No variety in drinks."

She looked up from her notebook, faux-devastation written all over her face. "What happened to you? It’s like I don’t even know you anymore."

"You’re the one who refused to let me leave," he pointed out cheekily.

"You’re the one who symbolically threw out the receipts for our wedding rings. We’re stuck with each other," she shot back, smirking. "Though that was before you uttered these blasphemous words and gave me a _real_ reason to reconsider."

They could joke about this now. _So much_ progress.

"What else?"

She took a folded sheet of paper from her notebook, shook it out, and handed it to him. It was printed with a long list of Halloween, horror, and witch-y movies, with three rows of boxes set before them, one with each of their names on top.

"Anything you don’t want to watch this year, put an ‘X’ –"

He snatched the pen from her hand and immediately crossed out the entire Harry Potter section, crowing: "No stinking book adaptations this year!"

"– in your box," she laughed. "Practical Magic is a book adaptation too, you know."

His eyebrows shot up. "What, really?"

"Yep."

"Fine. No adaptations of books I read first, then. Never ends well."

"See, was that so hard?"

Garcia looked up, momentarily thrown. "Was what so hard?"

"Taking this game ridiculously seriously."

"Ah. I guess not."

Smiling, he quickly skimmed the rest of the list of movies. If they were really doing this, he would probably be nixing most of the horror movies this year. It had always been a hit-and-miss genre for him; Lorena was the bigger fan of being scared and disturbed and disquieted for fun. He’d give it more thought in the morning. Now, though, he realized with a jolt that for all her laughter, there was an ‘X’ in front of Practical Magic in Lorena’s column. Of all their annual October rewatches, that was her favorite. Before they had Iris, they’d attended three Halloween parties in a row dressed like Nicole Kidman’s character and her undead nightmare boyfriend, grey skin paint and orange contact lenses for him and all, the actor’s likeness to him amused her so much. And he’d always had fun playing along, laying his accent on extra thick. For her to veto it this year...

Why was he surprised, though? Of course the murderous bastard with his face would hit differently now.

He met her eyes, mouth opening despite himself. But she immediately grabbed his hand, pressed a kiss to his palm, and then pressed his palm to her cheek. Her jaw was set and her eyes carried a warning.

"No Dead or Dying _Garcia_ Flynn, either," she said.

Taking a deep breath in and out, he let the fight with himself drain out of him along with the carbon dioxide. He ran his thumb along her cheekbone and nodded.

"Anything else?"

"That’s all for now."

"Okay." Garcia dropped his head on his pillow and yawned, only a little bit on purpose. "Then can we go back to sleep?"

"Of course, dear."

She handed him her notebook and the pen cap, and he put everything on his night stand for tomorrow. She turned out her bedside light, and they burrowed under the covers.

 _Lorena still believes in you,_ he told himself. _She still wants you, still loves you. She forgives you. Believe with her, Flynn._

He shuffled over to her side of the bed, wrapped an arm around her waist, and drew her to him. Humming contentedly, she burrowed into him. _‘Love you,’_ he breathed into her hair, and she murmured it back. He could fall asleep like this, he thought.

Of course, a disruptive, niggling feeling popped up to immediately prove him wrong. He wracked his brains, trying to remember, until –

"Hey, Lorena? Did I really hear you say you wanted to be spanked, earlier, or is my sleep-deprived brain making that up?"

"Only if I’m being patronizing and overprotective, I said."

Voice thick with impending slumber, she made it sound like a perfectly unremarkable way of phrasing ‘correct me if I’m wrong’.

"Say something really patronizing and overprotective," he whispered in her ear, grinning and squeezing her hip.

She chuckled silently; he felt the movement of it. "I don’t know. You were right the first time, sleep sounds pretty good."

"It’ll keep until tomorrow."

"Okay." She thought for a moment. "You can’t go swimming for at least an hour after you eat that cookie, or you’ll get a cramp and drown."

He gave her rump the tiniest, gentlest slap, and her hair a kiss. "Dreadful. I’ll remember that in the morning."

"Nice." She yawned hugely. "G’night, honey."

"You too." He nestled against her, breathed her in, and drifted. "You too."


	2. The Other Idea Threatening To Ruin The First Idea

Middle-of-the-night conversations never seemed quite real until they got a follow-up the morning after. His and Lorena’s conversation about the holidays became real much too soon to Garcia’s liking, because Iris woke them up at what felt like the crack of dawn by jumping on the bed between them and yelling "Halloween! Halloween! Halloween!" at the top of her lungs.

She, clearly, had _not_ forgotten about the tradition.

"Will I never know peace," he moaned, even as Lorena wrestled Iris down into a hug. When did preteen children start paying such close attention to the calendar? Garcia felt like when he was Iris’s age, he was barely aware of any day of the week that wasn’t a Friday, let alone the exact day of the month.

He yawned hugely and groped around to give his daughter’s hair a blind pat. She wriggled in her mother’s arms, probably trying to jump him. Lorena mercifully held her back.

"It’s Halloweeeeeeeen Month!" Iris sing-songed. She sounded just like Lorena had earlier that night. "Do you remember what that means?"

Rubbing his eyes until she stopped being blurry, he cracked a grin. "Remind me. I genuinely forgot."

"We start decorating the house and pick our costumes! I wanna be a zombie!" she blurted out, breathless with excitement.

...well. _That_ was off to a great start.

Garcia restrained his expression and carefully did not seek out Lorena’s gaze, but he could see her go ‘yikes’ over Iris’s head.

He pouted at Iris. "But a zombie won’t go with my and mama’s costumes."

"Why, what do you want to be?"

"...I’m not entirely sure yet. It’ll depend. But not zombies or anything that matches with a zombie, sorry. Too gross."

Iris shrugged. "Okay, then we don’t match this year. Big deal."

"No, it _is_ a big deal," Lorena said, and sat up with her. "In a couple of years you’ll be too old to still want to go trick or treating with your old, uncool parents, or even at all. We should match while we still can."

Iris looked at her like she’d just claimed the sky wasn’t blue. "Me? Not want to go trick-or-treating anymore? Never."

 _You say that now,_ Garcia thought with a fond, wistful smile. _But before you know it, you’ll insist on going with your friends instead of us. Maybe the year after that, you’ll use one of their younger siblings as your excuse to go one more time, and then it’ll be over. You’ll be too cool and mature, put away childish things, and respond to us asking about trick-or-treating like we’re trying to marry you off to Great Grampa Greg down the street._

"I’ll hold you to that," Lorena said, wrapping around Iris from behind until she let out a smothered little _‘ack!’_. "Grow up as slowly as you can, okay?"

He met Lorena’s eyes this time. They’d both missed far too many Halloweens with their daughter. ‘We should match while we can’ was hardly just a quick, empty excuse. It meant more than Iris could possibly comprehend.

Iris’s face was completely hidden behind Lorena’s hair, but Garcia could hear the frown in her voice. "Why can’t I do that as a zombie?"

"How about next year?" Garcia offered.

"There’s no fun –" Iris said with a withering air of patience, as she peeled her mother off of herself. "– in waiting a whole year."

"Sure, but that’s true every year, and every year, you can only wear one costume," Lorena said.

"Hey, why don’t you go as a bunny?" said Garcia. "You wanted to be a bunny last year, remember, but you wanted to be an astronaut more, so we saved the bunny idea for later. Mama and I could match as a cat and a dog. Or a crocodile and a penguin. Or..."

Iris frowned. "I didn’t go as an astronaut last year, I went as a mummy."

"The astronaut was the year the time travel started, honey," Lorena reminded him delicately.

"Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t –"

"That’s okay," Iris said, looking as awkward as he felt. "I don’t wanna be a bunny. How about a ghost?"

Really? Another Dead Iris? Well, at least that was one way to keep from falling down a well of guilt and paradoxical, triple-layered grief while Lassie was still footsore from all the other times she’d had to run to fetch help this past year. Lorena had the right idea, he realized. Putting their lives and their family back together in this new, only half-familiar timeline got a little easier every month, that much was true. But it remained an uphill climb with barely ever a day’s rest, and despite everything life gave him – them – back for it, sometimes it was still completely emotionally exhausting. If they _could_ shuck some of the excess weight that always came with the holidays, they _should_.

"No," he told Iris apologetically.

"But we could match! I wear a sheet, mama draws a mustache on her face, and you wear a cardboard box."

Lorena laughed. "I like the way you think. That’s a really fun idea. Only I’d have nothing to do all month!"

"Awww."

"How about we all think about it some more and save deciding for later," Lorena suggested. "You should be getting ready for school right now. Come on, up you go. I’ll get the decorations from the attic while you’re gone, and we can get in the mood in the afternoon."

Iris sighed. "I already did my thinking, but okay, fine."

She clambered out of bed and left, the enthusiasm of her entrance replaced with the slightest frustrated stomp of her feet. Garcia and Lorena looked at each other with matching grimaces.

"Oh dear."

"Did I jinx it?" Lorena whispered.

"There’s bound to be a few setbacks. Let’s not be discouraged right away."

"You’re right. She can’t resist the promise of one of my hand-made costumes of literally anything other than Dead Iris forever."

They dressed and breakfasted and went through all the usual early morning chaos, and Garcia brought Iris to school before heading to work. Not many of the time team still lived the same lives they did before time travel. With Connor’s career trajectory altered almost beyond recognition, Rufus and Jiya had started their own tech company. Not much change there. On the other hand, when everything was finally, definitively over, Wyatt had expressed his intentions to pick up right where he left off. Two months in, though, having finally _truly_ realized that his old lifestyle was incompatible with restoring his and Jessica’s marriage and becoming a father to baby Marlon, he turned his entire life around anyway. Lucy had promptly quit her job at Stanford to relearn history and give herself time to figure out what she really wanted out of life, without her mother’s influence and expectations coloring all her decisions. She and Amy still hadn’t stopped traveling the world for more than a few weeks at a time. And Garcia, too, had given it only a few days’ thought before starting preparations to withdraw from his and Stiv’s company and all the black ops, clandestine affairs, and government contracts that came with it.

Retiring from open warfare had been one of his better decisions; retiring from spycraft was another. Lorena knew how much the work meant to him and so had never pushed, but even before Rittenhouse, she _had_ reminded him for years that he’d put in more than his fair share of time and mortal peril and moral compromise, he’d done his duty by every metric, he was allowed to pass on the burden if he wanted or needed to. Somehow he’d never quite believed her. He was so _good_ at what he did; how could he justify stopping when he might succeed where another failed, when it might weigh on them even more than it did him? And _after_ Rittenhouse, after what he’d done to fight them... it could have pushed him over the edge of serving, or whatever substitute he could find, until self-destruction, never to recover. It probably would have – if not for Lorena. How much Lorena wanted him to be okay, and how much she needed him.

So he’d left the fight behind at long last. He knew from previous experience that his mental health would suffer from a lack of daily structure in the wake of an armed conflict, though. So, again with the help of Lorena, who kept the books, he’d started a new company: a self-defense gym.

No injuries were reported in the overzealous newbie class, and one of the women who had taken advantage of the free course he offered to the support group that met in the back room once a week sought him out to thank him and sign up for some additional paid classes too. He got went through the movie list Lorena had given him on his lunch break, internet on hand to check if he was remembering the stories that went with some of the more forgettable, one word titles right. He went home at the end of the day feeling pretty good. A feeling that only intensified when small, rapid footsteps came thundering down the stairs as he locked the door behind himself.

He only barely managed to keep his footing as Iris launched herself up at him.

"Oof! Good grief, lady, it’s a good thing I keep in shape, or I’d be a pile of bruises now."

As he steadied himself, Iris turned her sneak attack into a dogged trek up toward his shoulders. She wrapped one arm around his neck and pointed up the stairs with the other. "My room, quickly! Hurry, tata, we need you!"

"Can I take my shoes and coat off first?" he asked mildly.

"No!"

"Let your father take his shoes off, sweetie, or you’ll be vacuuming in his wake," Lorena said, coming out of the living room with the stepladder. "Hi, honey."

"Hi to you too."

While Garcia and Lorena kissed each other hello, Iris made a disappointed noise and slid down from his shoulders. Garcia kicked off his shoes, shucked his coat, grabbed her before she could wander off too far, and swung her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. She squealed in delight.

"What’s going on upstairs and why do you need me and/or a stepladder for it?"

"The ballerina and I were going to hang bats from her bedroom ceiling," Lorena said.

"I’m not going as a ballerina," Iris replied immediately.

"Drat, foiled again."

Flynn found his face falling. "You started without me?"

"Only in Iris’s bedroom," Lorena said.

" _Especially_ in Iris’s bedroom?" He gave her a kicked puppy look, he couldn’t help it. "That’s the best part of the house."

Lorena looked surprised but apologetic. "I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you wanted to join in so badly."

"Your enthusiasm is a degree above mine and probably always will be, but this year, yes, please wait for me?"

She nodded and gestured him ahead of her up the stairs.

"Probably should’ve thought of that last night," he acknowledged as he maneuvered himself and Iris around the first bend in the staircase, careful not to bang her head or feet into the walls.

"Oh, of course not, you were barely awake. But as soon as we finish the ringmaster’s room, I’ll put it in the book."

" _Not_ going as a ringmaster."

Garcia could feel Iris wriggle on his shoulder as Lorena ruffled her hair.

"Sooner rather than later, daughter dearest, I _will_ find one that wins you over."

"Of course you will, mama mine," Iris said sweetly. "I’ll give you a hint: it’s undead. Like a zombie, a ghost, or a vampire."

Garcia deposited their daughter on her bed with a bounce and a _‘whee!’_ , and he and Lorena exchanged a look. Oh boy.

When it came to the Greater Holiday Season, Lorena had no shame or modesty, and Garcia had long since lost whatever he’d once had, swept away on the annual tidal wave of her enthusiasm. For all her zeal, though, she had _some_ restraint when it came to the holidays preceding Christmas. The October decorations through most of the house started out autumn-themed; the Halloween-y elements only crept in slowly until two weeks before the big day, the journey there half the fun, and they were gone again a week after at the latest. Iris, though, always got to go all out, all at once.

By either trading off the stepladder with Lorena or taking Iris onto his shoulders, Garcia helped string wool cobwebs along the walls and place black felt spiders with googly eyes and rainbow legs in their webs, hang a spiral of bats made of wire and colorful scraps of old clothes from the ceiling, covens of fairy light witches over the door, window, and wardrobe, and a glow-in-the-dark moon with a howling wolf cut from the center from the ceiling lamp. Iris’s duvet cover and pillowcase had already been changed for freshly laundered, purple and orange pumpkin-patterned ones, and her pen stand and the other items on her desk replaced with skeletal versions of themselves. The bedside lamp was now a ‘crystal’ skull that sent shards of rainbow throughout the room. And the namesake painting above Iris’s bed – by Lorena’s own hand – was hung with small crotcheted ghost dolls, the bottoms of their sheet bodies styled like a variety of white petals and each with a tiny, differently colored bloom tucked behind an ear.

Only the crotchet flower ghosts were decorations he and Lorena remembered. Five years had completely changed the repertoire. But once Iris told them who had worked on what, he liked to think he recognized their own hands in the work.

While he and Iris lay down on the floor to admire the ceiling, Garcia spied Lorena picking up the sloth and the kangaroo from the stuffed animal zoo lined up at the foot end of the bed. She turned them over in her hands one by one, examining them with a look in her eye Garcia knew well and felt a great swell of warmth to see again after so long. Lorena hand-made or modified many of their seasonal decorations each year. A season not spent creating was a season wasted, to her. But when the walls and ceilings were full and Iris showed no desire to swap one set of decorations out for another anytime soon...

That night, after Iris’s bedtime, Lorena took out her boxes of fabrics and started sorting the scraps and bales and old clothes into piles on the dinner table.

"Teddy bear costumes?" he guessed, leaning on the back of her chair.

"Not so loud with the ‘bears’, I can already hear the zoological lecture," she said with a smile. "But yes."

He leaned down to press a kiss behind her ear. "I bet she’ll love that."

"Here’s hoping. Don’t tell her, though. She can’t join in on this project."

"Why not?"

"I just think this will work better as a surprise gift."

The next day, the three of them visited Lorena’s favorite pumpkin patch to buy their first batch of pumpkins of the season. Lorena liked to carve one a day, every day of the month, like a Halloween advent calendar, both for decorative purposes and to cook with the pulp. And Garcia and Iris joined in whenever the mood struck them. By the end of the month, they’d have pumpkin lanterns strewn all throughout the yard, lined up along the driveway, hanging from the porch, and sitting in every window. Since both Lorena and Garcia went out trick-or-treating with Iris every year, nobody was ever home to hand out candy. But their house was a popular one nonetheless.

Iris ran around the farm and flitted from squash to pumpkin to gourd like a butterfly. Lorena spent most of the trip chatting with her old friends the farmers, subtly interrogating them on what she’d missed under the guise of catching up (an art she had become as proficient in in the past year as Garcia had ever been as a professional, and despite the circumstances, the part of him that had been and always would be a spy couldn’t be prouder of her), which left him and Iris to actually pick the pumpkins. Lorena had given them a list of what to look for. He thought they did a pretty good job of it, but of course, once she finally tore herself away from her conversation, she unearthed what must have been the most perfect specimen of pumpkinhood on the entire farm in thirty seconds flat.

They returned home loaded up with almost two dozen Capital-P Pumpkins and other squashes in every color; edible ones in different flavor intensities and carveable shapes and sizes, and little, artfully gnarly, purely decorative ones to keep them company.

"Why don’t we go as some of those superheroes from the movies?" Lorena asked as she drove.

Through the rearview mirror, Garcia could see Iris rolling her eyes. " _Everybody_ is going as superheroes."

"If it’s something unique you want, zombies and ghosts aren’t the way to go either, I’m afraid," he said.

Iris sighed. "Never mind. I just don’t wanna be a superhero."

"The villains, then?" he suggested.

"No."

"Sidekicks?" he went on, just to tease her.

"No."

"Villainous sidekicks."

"Noooo."

"Random civilians in need of saving by the superheroes?"

"Tataaaa," she whined.

"Iriiiis."

"Both of you are overlooking the obvious," Lorena cut in. "Clearly we’re going as three different colors of pumpkin this year."

Her earlier buoyant mood nowhere to be found anymore, Iris just shot the crate of pumpkins on the seat beside her a chagrined look. "Would they be they zombie pumpkins?"

"No, just pumpkin-pumpkins."

"Ghost pumpkins?"

"Pumpkin-pumpkins."

"Vampire pumpkins?"

"Pumpkin-pumpkins."

"Mummy pumpkins?"

"Pumpkin-pumpkins, pumpkin. You were already a mummy last year."

"How would you know?" Iris mumbled under her breath.

Lorena glanced through the rearview mirror with a frown. "You told us yesterday. And I checked."

Iris heaved an aggravated sigh and crossed her arms over her chest. "No fair, guys."

"Sweetheart, you know we would remember if I could," Garcia reminded her gently. _Reminded_ , not _pleaded with_. It was humiliating, how badly he wanted to beg his ten-year-old not to hate him, sometimes.

She huffed. "Not what I meant."

Garcia and Lorena exchanged a look.

"She’s _really_ insistent this year, isn’t she?" he whispered to Lorena as they unloaded their haul into the garage. "I know we missed a lot, but she wasn’t always like this, right?"

Lorena handed him the biggest, smoothest, orangest pumpkin of the bunch and picked an armful of the little decorative ones to bring inside herself. "Not that I remember either, no. This definitely feels new."

Iris wasn’t just insistent, she was absolutely _relentless_. And every time Garcia or Lorena told her no, she would give them these _looks_ he couldn’t figure out. She wanted these costumes for a reason, but when he asked her about it, all she’d say was, "Because I’ve _told_ you this is what I want a million times!"

Before they went to bed that night, warty little pumpkins and wreaths of silk autumn leaves and the occasional squirrel, cluster of toadstools, or wooden bowl of acorns and chestnuts decorated the whole house. The next day, Iris added a skeleton to her list of acceptable undead costumes, shot down about eighty living, inanimate, and metaphysical alternatives (who knew having to come up with new ideas all day long could be so exhausting?), and tried to badger them into accepting one of her suggestions by arguing that since they’d first turned the zombie one down by arguing that it wouldn’t match with their own costume ideas, and they obviously hadn’t actually _had_ any costume ideas to match with at the time, their objections were invalid.

She had a great career in bullshitting ahead of her, Garcia thought tiredly. But as a result, by the end of the night a frazzled Lorena had completely abandoned her traditional two-week buildup to Full Halloween Mode, leaving the house thoroughly haunted and hexed and invaded by all manner of strange creatures, and she’d hung so many wool cobwebs and felt spiders she no longer noticed the ones that got stuck in her hair. Neither of them had seen more than ten minutes of the ghost movie they’d put on as their initial distraction and decompression attempt.

Garcia caught her around the waist when she came down the step ladder in the garage. Which, even to Lorena’s standards, was a bit of a ridiculous place to decorate. He untangled a spider from her hair, tossed it back into the nearly empty box of spiders sitting on the top step of the ladder, and coaxed her chin up until she met his eyes. Hers were suddenly glossy with tears. His eyebrows scrunched up, and he didn’t even have to ask.

"Am I a bad mother?"

He cupped the back of her head, weaving his fingers through her curls. "You could never be a bad mother."

"Oh, why did I even ask?" she laughed bitterly, and wiped at her eyes. "I love you for saying that, but _of course_ you’d say that, and how could I trust your judgement? Part of you is still convinced _you’re_ a terrible father and husband just for being here."

Ouch. He ignored the no doubt unintended sting in those words, though. Iris’s behavior that day may have been emotionally draining for him, but it had gotten to Lorena so bad her hands were shaking from it.

"Apples and oranges," he said. A beat. "Apples and James’s giant peach."

Lorena made a face and rubbed at her eyes. "No, stop that, forget I said anything."

" _You_ stop." He ducked closer to her height and squeezed her shoulders. "Lorena, do you realize what you’re doing? You’ve decorated the entire house and you didn’t look like you enjoyed a minute of it. You’ve been dead quiet all day – no humming. I’ve had to earworm _myself_ with ‘This Is Halloween’!" he explained when she frowned. "And..." He swiped a thumb under her eye and raised a meaningful eyebrow. "Just because you’re her mother doesn’t mean you’re a bad person for still being human too."

"Fine, I’m just a giant hypocrite," she said, rolling her eyes.

He followed the path of that blue glare with a finger. "We covered incompatibility of needs and desires during the initial negotiations. I was barely awake and even I remember that."

True, they had yet to tell Iris about their plan. Of course they’d _intended_ to tell her about it – some version of it, at least. Giving a ten-year-old a free pass to say ‘no’ to everything with no consequences and live down to everybody’s expectations required a delicate hand. But then she’d announced _her_ plan to make theirs impossible before they’d even properly woken up. That complicated things a little.

"I don’t know what I was thinking. This whole idea of obligation-free holidays was childish nonsense from the get-go. Being a parent means sucking it up for the good of your children."

"Sometimes –" Garcia said slowly. "– being a parent means taking care of yourself first, because you can’t take care of them if you run yourself into the ground."

Lorena shook her head for a long while. Not in a disagreeing way, but in a ‘shaking the thoughts from your head’ kind of way. It didn’t seem to be working. Eventually she fisted her hands in his shirt, fingers clenching and unclenching.

"I..." Fingers white-knuckled, she rested her forehead against his chest for a moment. "I keep getting this phantom sensation in my hands. Like they’re covered in Iris’s blood again. The more she goes on about wanting to be dead, the clearer my mind conjures up the feeling again. That... that tightness your skin takes on after blood’s dried on it, you know?"

Garcia let out a hard, deep breath, hugged her as tightly as he could, and determinedly pictured their daughter flying a kite on the beach on her tenth birthday instead of laying in bed at the age of five with a bullet between her eyes and Lorena sprawled out on the floor beside her, riddled with more holes than he’d had time to count, or bleeding out too fast to save but just slowly enough to be torture, five years old all over again, as Agent Christopher’s arrest team forced him to the ground and screamed at Lorena to let go of the child and show them her hands. The kite was tucked away here in the garage somewhere; it looked like a pair of bird’s wings with grey-tipped white feathers. The wind had been chilly, but the sky beautiful. Iris had been so happy and big and alive.

"Yes, I know. You’re not a bad mother for not being ready, sweetheart."

She squeezed him with the same desperation he did her. "Right back atcha."

"We’ll explain to her why we don’t want –"

"No," she said, and pushed away to look at him. Her eyes were tired, but with a sigh she reinflated her chest and squared her shoulders, and she waved the moment away. "No, I don’t want her to end up feeling guilty or something. She hasn’t done anything wrong. Probably doesn’t even understand what she’s asking of us. No. I’ll find something she likes better than playing dead sooner or later. Besides, I already finished one of the teddy bear costumes."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"You’re right, it shouldn’t. Never mind, never mind."

She waved the moment away a little harder. He was happy to let her.

He let her go so she could step back and run her hands through her hair. She dislodged three more felt spiders in one go. She looked at the spiders strewn around her feet, up at him, down at the spiders again, and back up at him.

"Please tell my dignity that was all of them," she said, dropping her hands with an air of resignation.

He considered, pursing his lips and squeezing his eyes to slits. "It _was_..." He took the box of spiders and upended it over her head. "But not anymore. Tricky buggers."

Pretending not to smile, she threw up her hands in defeat. "I give up. Those things get everywhere. I’ve created monsters. Let’s go hide the poltergeist jack-in-a-boxes. It doesn’t count as a jump scare if you set _yourself_ up for it."

Garcia grinned evilly. "Already done. You better watch out."

Lorena’s mouth formed a perfect ‘o’. Then, lips curling despite her best efforts, her eyes widened and she fanned herself. She whispered huskily: "I better not cry?"

His grin physically couldn’t get any bigger. So he opted for wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her against him instead.

"Better not pout," he said, shrugging.

"Couldn’t imagine why," she murmured, and looped her arms around his neck to pull herself up high enough to kiss him. He plucked one last spider from her hair, got her legs around his waist, and carried her away.

(That night, during one of his sleepless wanderings, he hid the remaining spiders in their bicycle helmets and the glove compartment of the car. He’d changed his mind, there was no place that _wasn’t_ a hilarious place to fill with googly-eyed, rainbow-legged spiders.)

On October 4, Lorena took a break from the house and offered her pumpkin of the day to Garcia. She headed for the gym to do even the part of the bookkeeping she usually took care of remotely, got groceries, and did who knew what else afterwards. Meanwhile, Garcia stayed home, and Iris brought some friends over to make bright green slime and decorate Halloween jars to take it home in and terrorize their parents with.

While keeping half an eye on the gaggle of pre-teen girls giggling themselves silly in the kitchen and answering the occasional question when they couldn’t figure something out or find what they needed, Garcia carved his pumpkin. His fine motor skills felt cramped up, his finger joints rusty. For too many years, they’d done nothing but grip hilts or strike blows. Rigged up the occasional explosive, maybe, but sticking some bits into a slab of putty didn’t take as much finesse as the movies made it out to. But now Garcia watched his daughter laugh and play with her friends, twice as old as she was when he watched her die – both times – and he smiled to himself, and scrubbed the rust from his bones by carving the finest pattern of hearts and flowers and butterflies he could from the entire circumference of the pumpkin. This one was going on Iris’s windowsill.

"Frankenstein’s monster!" she exclaimed suddenly.

Garcia pried some loose pumpkin shell detritus from his newest hole and shot her a faux-apologetic look. "No."

"But you and mama could be the doctor and Igor," Iris insisted eagerly. "That would be perfect! I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before!"

"Sorry, but no. Write it down for next year."

Her friends gave her curious looks. Iris rolled her eyes at his antics and told them: "My parents won’t let me pick my own Halloween costume this year."

"You can pick your own costume –"

"They say they’ll let me pick my own costume, but then they shoot down every idea I have."

"– as long as it’s not some undead thing," he finished serenely.

"Undead like what?" one of the girls, Kayleigh, asked.

Iris ticked them off on her slimy green fingers. "I can’t be a zombie, or a ghost, or a mummy, or a vampire, or a skeleton..."

"Or Frankenstein," Garcia supplied helpfully.

"Or Frankenstein."

"Huh," Kayleigh said, pensive. "Could you be the Headless Horseman?"

Iris gasped in delight. Garcia shook his head in genuine regret this time. Iris pouted something fierce.

"How about a jiangshi?" one of the other girls, Weili, said.

"A _what_ now?" Iris asked.

"Jiangshi. They’re zombies, but Chinese. They wear traditional clothes and they hop! Like this."

She raised her arms in front of her, much like the zombies Garcia was familiar with from before all the zombie stories became mindless-but-superpowered mob predator apocalypse stories, and hopped around the kitchen like a bunny.

"That’s so much more coordination than the local zombies are capable of," Garcia laughed. "But girls, the problem isn’t that Iris hasn’t picked the _right_ undead creature, it’s that she hasn’t picked anything that _isn’t_ undead."

"No, the problem is that you won’t give any of my ideas a shot," Iris insisted.

"My costume is a famous female ruler every year," Weili said. "This year it’s President Rodham-Clinton."

As had become his custom, Garcia closed his eyes with a smile and took a moment to appreciate himself, his wife, and all their bunkermates for having managed to write the orange gibbon in chief out of history without even trying.

"I’m going to be a Christmas tree because my mom still had the costume from my brother’s school play last year," Kayleigh said.

The group of girls descended into a discussion of costumes past and present, and Iris’s weird parents were soon forgotten. Unlike when he and Lorena tried to discuss alternative options with her, Iris looked engaged and enthusiastic. Garcia crossed his fingers and went back to his carving.

That night, after Iris had gone to bed with a belly full of Lorena’s best all-the-fall-fruits-at-once pie yet and Garcia was washing the dishes, he reported: "Iris’s list of costume options has been expanded with Frankenstein’s monster, the Headless Horseman, or a jiangshi, a Chinese zombie creature in traditional garb."

Lorena’s left eyebrow twitched. She took out her little Halloween book and started scribbling in it, muttering things that sounded almost like ‘greedy, greedy’ and ‘you’re going to spoil her rotten, you crazy woman’.

Not quite the response he’d expected, but it was better than yesterday’s, he guessed.


End file.
